We know that we’ve been very hush-hush for a few months now, but it’s been for a good reason that we can now reveal to you all. Steve and Mike have been secreted away in their hidey-holes, furiously laboring away on the full campaign mode for Meeple Station! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/f1101c4caac32a64970f764c1314df5c459a5df0.png[/img] That’s right! We’ve been sitting on this for quite some time now, but we’re jiggling with anticipation to finally be releasing our complete story mode for Meeple Station. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/ebd0cb18b53819c4cc86b33bf485cfcba1ba01f8.png[/img] Along with the campaign, 1.0 will include loads of other fixes and features. We’ve revamped the combat and conflict in game, added a whole system for custom events, and more meaningful interactions with the surrounding star systems. We don’t want to give too much away about the campaign, so we’re not going to be dropping any story spoilers in this announcement! ;P [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/65ae7f294e4cf97d0fbd575e86bf42caf60e2f15.png[/img] [h2]So What's New?[/h2] New Tutorials! Believe it or not over the past two years we’ve had to re-make or completely revise the game’s tutorial at least a dozen times. However, now that we’re finally confident with the game’s major features we’ve wrapped up a long-requested comprehensive series of tutorials to guide new players through the game’s basics once and for all. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/94ecfe5ace76708f7bb78271621b25a9a40336ba.png[/img] Mods have also finally gotten some long-needed TLC, now with backward compatibility for older mods and refreshed support for dealing with all of the new features and content. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/7a5a325f6f9fbbbd2ee8f9fcb526441fd800ce9b.png[/img] Most importantly we have now introduced the Hyperdrive. Tired of your boring old home system in sandbox mode? Just up and leave, find a more interesting one! You can now build power hungry drives to move your station over to entirely new systems. We’ve been developing this behind the scenes since the Planets Update and are overjoyed to finally be able to open up the gates on this and make much more fully-realized use of the procedural star systems tech. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/11fb73e3142499f06e991233e237546dbc021b30.png[/img] With Hyperdrives also comes a more interesting stellar landscape. You’ll notice a whole lot of new markers and effects around planetary bodies. Hazardous meteor storms and debris orbiting moons and planets. These help identify points of interest (and danger!) on the map. Scouts will also be able to explore wreckages to bring back new technologies or refined materials. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/166f365ef0717f3174f57c844c7e8c158d16a72e.png[/img] Speaking of destructive meteors- we’ve also changed how brutal bombers and meteors used to be. They no longer mercilessly obliterate large sections of your station in the traditional firey game-ending fashion and send your poor crew into an admittedly difficult-to-salvage and vicious death-spiral. Instead, they now destroy only the single tile they hit and instantly auto-create a repair job for your engineers to run to try to patch back up. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/167c1d48a14bd2f35ae924adfe9b4c6b5a1f6d8c.png[/img] Speaking of running- the Meeple AI behaviors have had a lot of meaningful upgrades, such as finally having a basic sense of self-preservation, which they can now use in conjunction with the new running movement speed behavior in urgent situations, such as: suddenly being exposed to vacuum, or the bad intentions of pirates, or to avoid starving to death, or even just legging it to the bathroom for that incredibly urgent poo. The result being far higher crew survivability in general! Next up we’ve introduced Pillboxes and rally points. This allows more meaningful and direct control of your combat units. Pillboxes act as a way to tactically place dedicated guard posts, while rally points evacuate non-combatants from a room and calls all of your available guards to rush in and secure the area. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/3d7b1e257b7e3e29837de5e97d89e4c12ad646c5.png[/img] Another interesting addition to combat is pirate invaders. We’ve worked a good bit on their AI to include morale and thievery as their main modus operandi. Once pirates board your station, they’ll look for your storage containers and grab as many resources as they can carry before legging it for the airlock. We’ve always been slightly irked that pirates in video games seem to always be there to fight to the death and that’s just not what pirates do! They’re there to rob and steal your goodies! They’re not in the business of getting slaughtered so if too many of their comrades are injured or vaporized, you may see the rest flee and return to their station, preserving their numbers to fight again another day. All in all, pirates behave much more interestingly now. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33278505/5551597568cb488897f106f22274460901db17fd.png[/img] [h2]What? 1.0 Is Done?[/h2] This next patch will be our 1.0 release. We’ve had the groundwork for most of the major features and systems we’ve aimed to have in for 1.0 in your hands for long enough that we’ve been able to see all the lovely ways it can break and in what ways it can all be made better. Several months ago we decided to go quiet, just put our heads down, and dedicate a huge effort into smashing out a giant backlog of major and minor persistent bugs that have managed to darken our dev-days for all too long now- and implement new and partially-implemented features that have been on the backburner waiting for the parts they needed to be complete. All of the bug-fixing, optimization, and polishing we’ve accomplished go along-side with a crop of new features [like the events system] that were needed for the new Campaign Mode. As far as projects go, Meeple Station has been an absolutely gigantic learning experience for me, [Stephen] both as a programmer and game developer, but also in learning to work in a team development environment when Mike came on-board mid-project around March of last year, bringing the development team to a grand total of two. There is a conception we’ve noticed amongst many of our fans and critics alike, that we’re a much larger studio than we actually are. That’s probably our fault for not addressing that sooner- but it’s just me and Mike on the development team, and Alex our producer and general industry guru- across three countries and time zones: Australia, the US, and Spain, respectively. A lot has happened over the past two years, my family is two new children larger, three if you include Mike, (which I affectionately do) houses have been moved and stresses hath accumulated. When I first jumped into Meeple Station I had plenty of ideas and the grandest of ambitions. As time went on it became more evident that Meeple Station would either become an eternity project like our own personal favourite ‘Dwarf Fortress’ (God bless’ em), or it would need to have a foreseeable end point. So a year ago we roadmapped everything we wanted to reasonably have in for release, set to it, and still managed to take six months longer than we’d projected. Even though this development has been a really tough one that has strained at our purse-strings, we were determined to persevere through aggressive application of sweat equity to not to be one of those now-all-to-common EA projects that cuts and runs before it’s finished just because the going got tough. Having integrity is a big thing for us, even when it hurts- especially when it hurts. This does not mean we’re going to stop giving love to our little Meepley game! We will still be maintaining the game and issuing bug fixes, will still be listening to our community, and will still be throwing in a few new things here and there as time goes on. But this -is- our final push toward getting Meeple Station in a fully finished and playable state for 1.0 release. We’ve worked our butts off for the past two years and put our blood, sweat, and tears into making a game that we hope with all our heart will bring you all some joy from start to finish. All of that said, we’ll be taking these last few weeks to test the ever-loving heck out of it and make sure nothing untoward falls out. We’re aiming at March 30th for our Meeple Station 1.0 drop, so stay on the look out!